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The blackest billingsgate, the most
ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooist brutality, is patently endured,
countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in
collision with the dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof,
and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, hand the hornets will
swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.
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-John Adams
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I have never been sure I am right, but I am
also sure nobody else has this thing called truth.
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-Saul Alinsky
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*For whatever is hidden
is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought
out into the open.
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-Mark, 4:22
NIV
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*The light shines in the
darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
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-John, 1:5
NIV
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And ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free.
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-John, 8:32
KJV
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~TRUTH, n. An ingenious
compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole
purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human
mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the
end of time.
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-Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary, 1906
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A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
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-William Blake
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There is no legitimate religion apart from
truth.
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-John Calvin
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The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may
attack it. Ignorance may deride it. But in the end, there it is.
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-Winston Churchill
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It is not truth that makes men great, but
man who makes truth great.
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-Confucius
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The river of truth is always splitting up
into arms which reunite. Islanded between them the inhabitants argue for
a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
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-Cyril Connolly
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*Speaking the truth is
easy. Knowing the truth is not.
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-Michael Conover
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Fraud and falsehood only dread examination.
Truth invites it.
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-Thomas Cooper
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Chase after the truth like all hell and
you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
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-Clarence Darrow
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There is nothing so strong or safe in
an emergency of life as the simple truth.
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-Charles Dickens
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When you have excluded the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
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-Arthur Conan Doyle
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Truth is the summit of being.
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-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The truth is always simpler than you
expect.
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-Richard Feynman
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All truths are easy to understand once they
are discovered; the point is to discover them.
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-Galileo Galilei
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The first and last thing required of genius
is the love of truth.
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-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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~Once in a while you can
get shown the light,
In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
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-Grateful Dead (Robert Hunter-lyrics, Jerry
Garcia, Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Donna Godchaux)
From the Mars Hotel, 1974
"Scarlet Begonias"
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Truth is not determined by majority vote.
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-Doug Gwyn
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*Truth cannot be
believed; Truth must be Known.
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-Steve Hagen
How The World Can Be The Way It Is: An
Inquiry for the New Millenium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception,
1995
Part I : Nobody Knows What's Going On, Ch. 1, "Belief", "Truth Cannot Be
Believed"
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*Once
again, in silence--in scented, moist, hot air which stirred vague memories
--I lifted my pack, took a deep breath, and continued the climb. In the
gathering dark, I occasionally knocked my pack against the rock.
The final ascent was straight up a long run of stairs
to an enormous gatehouse. Beneath the upturned root, on either side of the
gate, two giant figures stood in silhouette against the last glimmer of
twilight. Even at this distance, I saw that they were very large, and that
they stood with menacing aspect.
As I approached they appeared wind-blown, for their
robes seemed to fly about them--yet there wasn't any wind and nothing was
moving. I could see their eyes, fierce and fixed upon the stairs. They
stood frozen in hideous expressions, looking down upon me as I came. The
lips of one were drawn back over bared teeth in a silent scream, the other,
with mouth shut and downturned, frowned with serious intent. They were
like two gigantic ghost-demons, now glowing in the light of the rising full
moon.
Yet I came on.
Quickly, silently, the small figure of a monk appeared
between them. He had come to take my bag and usher me in. "Who are they?"
I asked. "Paradox and Confusion," came the reply, "the guardians of Truth."
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-Steve Hagen
How The World Can Be The Way It Is: An
Inquiry for the New Millenium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception,
1995
Introduction, "Paradox and Confusion"
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The truth is supposedly always in the middle--
a dangerous fallacy.
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-Douglas Hofstadter
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Truth is tough. It will not break, like a
bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football,
and it will be round and full at evening.
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-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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The foundation of all morality is to have
done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions
about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
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-Thomas Henry Huxley
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You should never wear your best trousers
when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
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-Henrik Ibsen
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There is not a truth existing which I fear. . .
Or would wish unknown to the whole world.
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-Thomas Jefferson
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To this end I was born, and for this cause
came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone
that is of the truth heareth my voice.
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-Jesus
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Only enemies speak the truth; friends and
lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
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-Stephen King
The Gunslinger
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*When truths are once
known to us, though by tradition, we are apt to be favorable to our own
parts and ascribe to our own understandings the discovery of what, in
reality, we borrowed from others-or, at least, finding we can prove what
at first we learn from others, we are forward to conclude it an obvious
truth, which, if we had sought, we could not have missed. Nothing seems
hard to our understandings that is once known; and because what we see, we
see with our own eyes, we are apt to overlook or forget the help we had
from others who showed it us and first made us see it, as if we were not
at all beholden to them for those truths they opened the way to and led us
into. For knowledge being only of truths that are perceived to be so, we
are favorable enough to our own faculties to conclude, that they of their
own strength would have attained those discoveries, without any foreign
assistance, and that we know those truths by the strength and native light
of our own minds, as they did from whom we received them by theirs, only
they had the luck to be before us. Thus the whole stock of human knowledge
is claimed by everyone as his private possession, as soon as he (profiting
by other's discoveries) has got it into this own mind-and so it is-but not
properly by his own single industry nor of his own acquisition.
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-John Locke
The Reasonableness of Christianity as
Delivered in the Scriptures, 1695
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All men who know not where to look for truth
save in the narrow well of self, will find their own image at the bottom and
mistake it for what they are seeking.
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-James Russell Lowell
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Truth, after all, wears a different face
to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait til all were agreed.
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-James Russell Lowell
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If you tell people the truth, you better
make them laugh or they'll kill you.
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-Charles Ludlam
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I would not favour a fiction to keep a
whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of
is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth... that
saves the world.
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-George Macdonald
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If falseheood, like truth, had but one face,
we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what
the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred
thousand faces and an infinite field.
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-Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
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Only the refusal to listen guarantees one
against being ensnared by the truth.
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-Nozick
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Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and
the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its
antagonist, and never of itself.
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-Thomas Paine
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It does not require many words to speak the
truth.
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-Nez Perce
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If you speak the truth, have a foot in
the stirrup.
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-Turkish proverb
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*People think that a liar
gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an
act of self-abdication, because one surrender's one's reality to the person
to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from
then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be
faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie--the price one
pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The
man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.
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-Dagny Taggart, a heroine in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A Is A, Ch. III, "Anti-Greed"
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*Truth is the recognition
of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of
truth.
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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A Is A, Ch. VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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*As soon as absolute
truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there
is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts
infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
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-George Bernard Shaw
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Truth has always been found to promote the
best interests of mankind.
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-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The simple step of a courageous individual
is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
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-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by
its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
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-Leo Tolstoy
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Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
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-Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
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-Mark Twain
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Always tell the truth. That way, you don't
have to remember what you said.
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-Mark Twain
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A thing is not necessarily true because a
man dies for it.
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-Oscar Wilde
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The truth is more important than the facts.
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-Frank Lloyd Wright
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